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commonly used together we might as well treat them as one single feature.
Call parking allows calls to be placed on hold and then retrieved from a location dif‐
ferent from where they were originally answered. Paging uses a public address system
to allow announcements to be sent from the telephone system (for example, to
announce who the parked call is for and how it can be retrieved).
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Chapter 11: PBX Features, Including Parking, Paging, and Conferencing
Some businesses, perhaps with large warehouses, outdoor areas, or employees who
move around the office a lot, utilize the paging and parking functionality of their sys‐
tems to direct calls around the office. In this chapter we’ll show you how to use both
parking and paging in the traditional setting (park ’n’ page), along with a couple of
more modern takes on these commonly used functions.
Call Parking
A parking lot allows a call to be held in the system without being associated with a
particular extension. The call can then be retrieved by anyone who knows the park
code for that call. This feature is often used in conjunction with a public address (PA),
or “paging” system. For this reason, it is often referred to as “park-and-page.” It
should be noted that parking and paging are in fact separate. We’ll cover paging
momentarily, but first, let’s talk about call parking.
Let’s grab a copy of the sample file that we’ll use to configure call parking:
$ sudo cp ~/src/asterisk-16.<TAB>/configs/samples/res_parking.conf.sample \
/etc/asterisk/res_parking.conf
$ sudo chown asterisk:asterisk /etc/asterisk/res_parking.conf
$ sudo asterisk -rx 'module load res_parking.so'
To park a call in Asterisk, you need to transfer the caller to the feature code assigned
to parking, which is assigned in the res_parking.conf file with the parkext directive.
By default, this is 700:
parkext => 700 ; What extension to dial to park (all parking lots)
You have to wait to complete the transfer until you get the number of the parking
retrieval slot from the system, or you will have no way of retrieving the call. By
default the retrieval slots, assigned with the parkpos directive in res_parking.conf, are
numbered from 701 to 720:
parkpos => 701-720 ; What extensions to park calls on (defafult parking lot)
Once the call is parked, anyone on the system can retrieve it by dialing the number of
the retrieval slot (parkpos) assigned to that call. The call will then be bridged to the
channel that dialed the retrieval code.
There are two common ways to define how retrieval slots are assigned. This is done
with the findslot directive in the res_parking.conf file. The default method (find
slot => first) always uses the lowest-numbered slot if it is available, and only
assigns higher-numbered codes if required. The second method (findslot => next)
will rotate through the retrieval codes with each successive park, returning to the first
retrieval code after the last one has been used. Which method you choose will depend
on how busy your parking lots are. If you use parking rarely, the default findslot of
first will be best (people will be used to their parked calls always being in the same
Parking and Paging
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slot). If you constantly use the parking feature (for example, in an automobile dealer‐
ship), it is far better for each successive page to assign the next slot, since you will
often have more than one call parked at a time. Your users will get used to listening
carefully to the actual parking lot number (instead of just always dialing 701), and
this will minimize the chance of people accidentally retrieving the wrong call on a
busy system.
Handling Timed-Out Parked Calls with the comebacktoorigin Option
This option configures the behavior of call parking when the parked call times out
(see the parkingtime option). comebacktoorigin can have one of two values:
yes (default)
When the parked call timeout is exceeded, Asterisk will attempt to send the call
back to the peer that parked this call. If the channel is no longer available to
Asterisk, the caller will be disconnected.
no
This option would be used when you want to perform custom dialplan function‐
ality on parked calls that have exceeded their timeouts. The caller will be sent
into a specific area of the dialplan where logic can be applied to gracefully handle
the remainder of the call (this may involve simply returning the call to a different
extension, or performing a lookup of some sort).
You also may need to take into account calls where the originating channel cannot
handle a returned parked call. If, for example, the call was parked by a channel that is
also a trunk to another system, there would not be enough information to send the
call back to the correct person on that other system. The actions following a timeout
would be more complex than comebacktoorigin=yes could handle gracefully.
Parked calls that timeout with comebacktoorigin=no will always be sent into the